OIT Times: Geographically Dispersed Plants Drive Innovative Outreach Measures in Utah
September 22, 2001
Utah is a large state with far-flung plants making the state IOF program focus on outreach and communication especially valuable.
ee found extraordinarily high interest in OIT opportunities once our companies learn about them,said Patti Case, manager of the Utah state IOF effort.
Case noted that Best Practice opportunities to cut near term energy use are of special interest, and her team has held several workshops and training sessions for its industrial customers. ost of our plants are too small to have in-house engineering staffs, so many of the Best Practice tools are new and of immediate value to them,she said.
Outreach efforts that bring together geographically dispersed participants pay off in other ways, too. The Univ. of Utah new Industrial Assessment Center has begun performing energy-saving audits for several Utah plants. New teams have won several grants from OIT NICE3 and Inventions and Innovation programs.
Utah IOF has put considerable emphasis on its website, as well. e decided to make our site as content-rich as possible so people could use all the available tools and information immediately,said Case. Indeed, Utah won est State IOF Websitehonors at OIT 2001 Expo.
Utah plans include boosting the number of Allied Partners in the state to help disseminate Best Practice methods even further. Other plans include expanding the Utah IOF effort to include Utah metal casting industry, as well as industries that are not on OIT OFlist but that are important to the state. t sometimes difficult to say what is IOF and what isn because the program has so many synergies with everything related to energy efficiency in Utah,Case said.
For more information, visit www.uiof.org/